


I Wish I Had a River (Ma Would Let Me Skate Away On)

by cablesscutie



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Christmas fic, Flashbacks, Hockey, M/M, New York Rangers, childhood stucky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 06:49:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5529947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cablesscutie/pseuds/cablesscutie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve is too small to play hockey with the neighborhood kids, but figure skating is right up his alley.  Bucky would watch Steve skate all day long if he could.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Wish I Had a River (Ma Would Let Me Skate Away On)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lovely-little-machines (dragon_1986_citys_lights)](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=lovely-little-machines+%28dragon_1986_citys_lights%29).



> This is a Christmas present for my best friend in the world: lovely-little-machines! Shamelessly playing to her love of Stucky fluff and hockey ;)

It’s 1926, and the economy is still booming, but the Barnes family has four children, and Sarah Rogers is all alone with her sick son, so money is never a thing to be hastily spent. Every year, Steve and Bucky coordinate their Christmas wishes. They know they’ve only got one each, and there’s no use in both of them having army man figures when they could have one set of army men and one set of marbles to share. It is, without a doubt, the most important joint decision two eight year olds are capable of making. This year, they’ve settled on a pair of ice skates for each of them. The frozen pond in the park looks too fun to resist, and New York winters seem to last half the year anyway.

Bucky finds his wrapped in the funnies from his father’s Sunday paper, which he’s careful not to rip as he unwraps the skates. He’s read them once, but mostly forgotten the jokes, so if he flattens them out under his bible, he and Steve will both get a laugh out of them in a week or so. Tucked in his stocking with the skates is a crisp, red apple and a peppermint stick from Woolworth’s. He resolves to split both treats with Steve. If there’s anything Stevie needs, it’s a smile and some fresh fruit.

“Thankyouthankyouthankyou!” he bursts, flinging his arms around his mother’s shoulders and then his father’s waist, nearly knocking him back onto the couch with the force of his enthusiasm.

“Easy there,” George cautions him, steadying Bucky with a big hand on his shoulder.

“And what do you ladies have to say?” Winifred prompts his sisters.

“Thank you mom!” Becca chirps, looking up from where she’s tying one of Anna’s new hairbows in place.

“Thank you dad!” Anna adds.

“Merry Christmas,” Winifred laughs as the girls immediately return to their hair braiding and doll dressing.

After a quick breakfast of eggs and toast, Mrs. Barnes herds the children off to their rooms to get dressed for church. Bucky slips the peppermint stick into his pocket on his way out of the house, grinning as he goes.

 

Steve wakes up early on Christmas morning, only a scant three hours after falling asleep after midnight Mass. He fishes his father’s pocketwatch out of the box under his bed and squints at the tiny Roman numerals in the dim light. Too early to wake Ma, she’s always tired enough as is, so he scoots out from his bed and tugs on two pairs of socks and a hand-me-down sweater from Bucky before tip-toeing out to the kitchen. He fills the tea kettle on the stove and sets it to boil while he climbs up on a chair to grab two bowls and his mother’s favorite china teacup. He drags the chair over to the stovetop so he can stir the oatmeal into a saucepan, hopping down with muffled feet to fetch the molasses and cinnamon, racing back just in time to pull the kettle away before the low whine pitches up into a full whistle and wakes his mother. He steeps the tea while the oatmeal finishes and when everything is ready, he piles it on the tray set aside for when he’s bedridden and carries it into his mother’s bedroom.

“Mama,” he whispers into the darkened bedroom, and it’s no surprise that he almost immediately hears the shifting of sheets as Sarah stirs and struggles upright against the pull of sleep.

“Steve? Is everything alright?” she asks, flicking on the bedside lamp and squinting against the sudden brightness, inspecting him. He pads across the room, stopping at her bedside to offer the tray and a small smile.

“Merry Christmas.”

“What’s all this? You made me breakfast?” she asks, taking the tray from his little hands before he drops it, her smile big and her throat tight. Steve nods, and his blonde bangs bob with the motion. He needs a haircut soon. He hops and squirms until he’s succeeded in climbing up onto the bed with her, leaning against his mother’s shoulder and taking his bowl of oatmeal back. Sarah tucks him under her arm, which complicates the eating part a bit, but she doesn’t really mind. She keeps pausing to kiss his forehead and tickle his ribs anyway.

His gift is more of a rushed afterthought when they get around to it, but Steve is thrilled anyway, beaming and lacing them up to check the fit as though he hadn’t known what was going to be wrapped inside the giant knitted scarf anyway. Steve bundles himself up in his winter coat and the soft blue scarf before practically dragging Sarah off to the church. Even though he’d seen Bucky just a few hours ago at midnight Mass, they’d both been to sleepy by the end to say much of anything except “Merry Christmas,” and “see you tomorrow.”

The Rogers join the Barnes's in their pew as they often do, Steve squishing right up to Bucky’s side like usual, both boys immediately launching into excited planning of their afternoon tomorrow, when they’ll finally be free to go try out their new skates. When Father Mathews starts up the sermon, Bucky slips the peppermint stick out of his pocket and breaks it in half, pressing the slightly larger piece into Steve’s palm before he can notice. Steve wears a soft smile for the whole two hours, and Bucky’s fingers tingle where’d they’d brushed Steve’s hand.

 

Bucky knocks on the Rogers’ front door bright and early the next morning, skates slung over his shoulder and his father’s warm hunting cap pulled down over his ears.

“Well good morning, James,” Mrs. Rogers greets him, stepping aside to let him in. “What a surprise to see you,” she laughs, smiling down at Bucky in a bemused way that says she absolutely knew to expect him. “Steve!” she calls. “James is here!”

Steve comes skidding around the corner with a thousand-watt smile, already bundled up with as much as Mrs. Rogers could fit on his skinny bones.

“Come on, Steve, some of the other kids were starting a hockey game in the park! We can still join ‘em if we hurry!” Bucky was bouncing on his toes, ready to jet off, and Steve’s eyes lit up.

“Oh, I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Mrs. Rogers said gently, resting a hand on Bucky’s shoulder to stop him.

“Ma -” Steve started to complain, but she cut him off.

“No. Steve, hockey is way too rough, you’ll break your neck. Promise me you won’t play, alright?”

“But Mom -”

“No buts! You can skate all you want, but I don’t want you getting shoved around like that. You’ll get hurt.” She turned to Bucky. “You hear me, James Buchanan? He’s not to be roughhousing with those kids, and if he is, you’re to come right back here and get me.” Bucky glances at Steve’s dejected face out of the corner of his eyes, but promises,

“Yes ma’am,” shooting an apologetic look Steve’s way.

“Have fun, and be back in time for dinner,” she reminds them, pressing a kiss to each of their foreheads and shooing them out the door.

“Don’t worry, Stevie. We’ll have plenty of fun on our own,” Bucky tells him, tossing an arm around Steve’s shoulders, which are finally normal sized from all the sweaters he’s got stuffed under his coat.

Bucky ends up roped into the game anyway. After a few shaky laps around the lake, he starts to get the hang of skating, pulling Steve clumsily along behind him, and Jimmy Doherty drafts Bucky to his team when Alice Plummer’s mother catches her playing and drags her home. Steve pushes him towards the game, urging,

“Go ahead, Buck. You wanted to play.” Bucky bites his lip, glancing between the game and Steve guiltily. He always hates leaving Steve behind, and Steve knows it - gets annoyed at it all the time because he can’t see it as anything but pity.

“I wanted to play with you.”

“They can’t finish the game down one, it’s three on three.” Bucky nods and gives Steve’s mittened hand a squeeze before agreeing,

“Alright, but just ‘till this game is over.”

While he waits, Steve keeps doing laps, picking himself up off the ice when he tips over, and hoping that Bucky can’t see. He checks over at game every couple of minutes to see how Bucky’s doing, but most of his focus is on keeping himself from tripping over his own skates. By the time the church bells ring and signal the end of the game, Steve has a pretty steady pace going.

“Hey, look at you go!” Bucky calls after him as Steve skates right on past him.

 

Over the course of the next several winters, Bucky and Steve keep up with their skating. It makes Steve stronger and gets some fresh air into his lungs, and Bucky watches the red of his nose and cheeks with soft eyes. The other kids get into a habit of dragging Bucky away at the beginning of their hockey games, but Steve continues to not mind, actually enjoying the chance to watch Bucky in his element - he’s always been so good at sports - while he loops lazily around the pond.

Sometimes he gets excited when Buck scores a goal, or boredom sets in, and Steve gives a little hop. The first few times end with him tumbling ass over teakettle into the snow, but he keeps at it and eventually makes the landing.

When Steve finally makes a spin, Bucky has the puck stolen right out from under his nose.

 

Even after they outgrow neighborhood hockey games, Steve keeps up with skating. After church, he grabs his skates and heads off to the park, Bucky in tow. Bucky, for his part, never gets a new pair of skates after he outgrows the ones he’d used in high school. Once the games were over, he found he didn’t have much of an urge to get back on the ice. Instead, he prefers to sit on a bench to the side, watching Steve weave in and out between the children and other leisurely skaters, leaping and twirling with ease. He’s so beautiful and impossibly graceful. Bucky wonders briefly if this is how it feels for Steve to watch him from the edges of a dance hall. He hopes so. He hopes that the swooping feeling in his stomach and the tingling of his fingers is a shared thing - that Steve is as hopelessly in love as Bucky.

Steve turns backwards as he skates past Bucky, locking eyes and smiling brightly until Bucky has to frantically signal for him to turn. He dances out of the path of a family just in time, hopping into a spin, which he lands neatly before continuing on. When he tires and returns to the bench where Bucky has been pretending to read, the spray of ice from his skates feels like a kiss somehow.

 

The year Bucky works up the nerve to propose to Steve, the New York Rangers challenge the Avengers to a Christmas Eve showdown. Tony doesn’t exactly bother consulting the rest of the team before accepting the challenge, so Steve and Bucky actually find out about it via Facebook alerts before they get a call from Stark.

“Do you know anything about this?” Bucky asks Steve, holding up his cellphone so Steve can see the Facebook event.

“Um...no? What’s it supposed to be?”

“Apparently we’re playing in a hockey game today?” Steve rolls his eyes and falls back onto the couch, head in Bucky’s lap.

“Staaaaaaaark,” he whines. Bucky smiles down at him, but Steve isn’t ready to be done pouting, so he rolls onto his side and hides his face against his fiance’s stomach instead.

“Hey, you always wanted to play when we were kids, and now you’re gonna get to face off with the pros.”

“But it’s Christmas Eve,” he protests. Bucky feels the words vibrate up against his spine and laughs at the tickle. “And we’re oooold! I just want to stay here with you, drink some eggnog, then go to bed at a reasonable hour. Is that too much to ask?”

“Yes, actually. You know our lives don’t work that way. Besides, this’ll be fun. You haven’t gone skating since you got back, have you?” Steve rolls back over to stare up at Bucky, heaving a resigned sigh and dropping the pout.

“No, I guess I haven’t. I’m sure it’ll be fun, I just wish we got to spend this year alone together.”

“Me too, but we’re gonna get to spend all the years together,” he reminds Steve, lacing their fingers together and spinning the band on Steve’s left hand. “What’s one Christmas Eve against all that?”

On Christmas Eve, Tony meets the team in the locker rooms at Madison Square Garden, armed with gear bags and jerseys printed with their names. Steve holds his up and grins at Bucky when both of theirs say BARNES.

“Don’t think this makes up for signing us up for this without asking,” Steve warned Tony, the smile on his face and the hug he pulled him into betraying his stern tone.

“Yeah, yeah,” Tony brushed the affection off, giving Steve a couple awkward pats on the back.

 

When the Avengers and the Rangers take the ice, the stadium is packed full, mostly with children who can’t decide who they’re more excited to see. Almost as soon as the game gets started, Bucky gets thrown in the penalty box. Apparently neighborhood hockey rules don’t comply with NHL regulations. Go figure. He can’t bring himself to feel too bad though. For the next two minutes, he gets to sit back and relax, watching Steve twirl his way around the rink, stealing the puck as he drops out of a spin. Bucky may need to ask the ref how long he’d get to stay there if Stark suffered from a little bit of friendly fire.


End file.
